After a week here my Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) is getting better. Yesterday I moved on from common greetings to ordering meal and drinks in the local lingo. Everybody really appreciates your efforts, and will try to teach you a few more hundred words. Meanwhile I got closer to the folks in Sahur's village. Went for dinner to his place a couple of time, went to the Monkey Forest, where i received my first marriage proposal from an eighteen years old girl (
Tida Apa Apa, commented Sahur,
No Problem, they get married even at 16 here!) and as a good ex-googler I helped the village folks with some computer problems. There's a Dutch project involved in improving life conditions in the village. They helped with getting water to the village, getting kids to school and they also provided a common laptop so that all kids can practice after school. The thing is, it's quite an old laptop, and for some reason the cursor every now and then starts drifting around like crazy and goes hiding in the nearest corner, making it impossible to do any work. Well two months without Google are not enough to get the geek out of me, so after a few hours on the internet i was able to fix the problem. If you have an Inspiron 8000something with the same problem
here's the fix.
I really have to stop talking like a nerd, so lets move on and say that fixing the laptop really allowed me to get closer to the community. Going up to the village after a day on the beach is like going home, with everybody saying hello, all kids approaching (for those of you that are fans of Bud Spencer is like when Banana Joe comes back to the village almost!) and hours spent outside in the brugah eating bananas (fresh or fried) and drinking coffee (which is actually cultivated here on the island). Oh and for the femail readers of this blog, I politely declined the girl's marriage offer.
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